In the search for greater fuel efficiency and emission reduction in internal combustion engines, as for automobiles, improved means to ignite leaner fuel mixtures and to approach complete combustion are desirable objectives. However, until stringent federal and state legislation was recently passed requiring the automotive industry to reduce emissions, the major emphasis has been placed upon performance rather than emission control and economy. As performance was believed to be related directly to the richness of the fuel mixture, most of these automobiles had air/fuel analyzer readings which were off scale on the rich end, e.g., 10/1 or less at idle and during deceleration.
It is evident that emissions (other than evaporative loss results from faulty combustion of the air/fuel mixture in the engine combustion chamber; hot spots form NO.sub.x (oxides of nitrogen), cold spots form CO (carbon monoxide) and HC (unburned hydrocarbons). Early 1st and 2nd generation measures to reduce emissions required excessive maintenance and degraded performance as exemplified by the many versions of "tailoring" the spark advance curve from idle to road speed. Recently, the trend has favored the use of afterburners, the catalytic converter being the most popular. These 3rd generation devices are essentially clean-up methods which attack the problem "after the fact" that incomplete combustion is occurring in the combustion chamber. The Honda firm of Japan, with their stratified charge engine, has attacked the problem head-on by improving the combustion process. The purpose of this invention is to further improve combustion through the use of a novel ram compression ignition system.